Video Report: Army Research Lab Scientist Talks About Developing AI-Enabled Robot Tanks
By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven
(Washington, D.C.) Overwhelming enemy fleets and coastal defenses with surveillance and weapons, finding weak spots along an enemy coastline to pinpoint areas for breakthrough attacks and bringing a dispersed fleet of networked communications and attack Unmanned Surface Vehicles into hostile areas — are all anticipated missions for the Navy’s emerging fleet of drone boats.
The service is now fast tracking and testing all types and sizes of networked, prototyped surface drones as part of an “Operation Overlord” strategy program to multiply and coordinate large integrated fleets of unmanned systems. The Navy intends to align them all on a common command and control system able to quickly integrate war-crucial data in ocean combat.
“We are prototyping Phase II of the Overlord program,” Capt. Pete Small, Program Manager, Unmanned Maritime Systems, Naval Sea Systems Command, told reporters at the Surface Navy Association Symposium in January, 2020.
The current work, Navy weapons developers explain, is to test and refine emerging levels of autonomous operations, multiple drone boat coordination and new strategy developments. While referring to seven prototype unmanned vessels now in the process of being delivered, Small explained that a fleet of multiple ocean drones were being developed to support and integrate with much larger unmanned surface vehicles, such as a new Medium and Large USVs.
“We need these vessels to demonstrate a number of different autonomy technologies and a variety of different payloads envisioned. We also need them to match fleet conops (Concepts of Operation) which include multiple USVs in proximity with each other,” Small said.